Anorak

The Consumer Category

We bring you the chic and unique, the best and most bizarre shopping offers both online and offline. We offer you tips on where to buy, and some of the less mainstream and crazy, individual and offbeat items on the internet. Anything that can be bought and sold can be featured here. And we love showcasing the best and worst art and design.

Artist Ben Wilson who paints art on discarded gum, and is also known as ‘Chewing Gum Man’, at work on the Millennium Bridge in London.

BEN Wilson is the chewing gum artist. We say ‘the’ because we can’t find anyone else who paint of splats of discarded, squashed gum. He is the self-styled ‘Chewing Gum Man’. Today, Ben was painting pictures you can take home on the sole of your shoe on the Millennium Bridge in London.

BRANDENBURG Germany is enticing tourists with a calendar featuring a photo of an expansive cottage. It turns out that this holiday home once belonged to Hermann Goering, the German politician. The German federal Government is aghast, ordering the calendar to be pulped. You won’t get to look at Himmler’s en-suite (March) or Martin Bormann’s spare room (also March. In fact, it’s all March.)

FLASHBACK to June 1, 1932: Five members of the Alcohol Prohibition Research Committee depart on the bus Diogenes, named after the man who sought in vain for an honest man, in New York City. The membership is seeking one drunk who has been reformed by the 18th amendment in their campaign against the liquor ban. From left are, Stephen Duggan Jr., assistant investigator; Russell Salmon, chief investigator; Ernest Boorland Jr., member of the executive committee; Robert Nicholson, assistant director; and Paul Morris, director.

“They want to help children with disabilities and this was just something that happened in their cafe and they are not proud of it,” says Catherine Duke.

Last week, an assistant manager at a Savannah Panera Bread, told Duke’s 2-year-old daughter to remove her shoes. A customer had complained they were squeaking “too much”. “We weren’t welcome with the shoes. It was very blatant,” adds Duke. “Emma has an undiagnosed developmental disorder that prevented her from walking until she was 23-months-old. These are special shoes. They squeak when she walks properly.”

FACE of the Day: World Scotch Pie winner Stephen McAllister, from Kandy Bar bakers in Saltcoats, celebrates after being presented with his prize at The Scotch Pie Awards at Carnegie conference centre in Dunfermline.

LADY mannequins inside the American Apparel store window displays on East Houston Street in New York City are now sporting full bush, Gothamist reports. Under the flimsy, translucent undergarments of each of the bespectacled female dummies sprouts a dark hairy merkin. There’s no doubt that the controversial exhibit will stop pedestrians in their tracks, and really isn’t that what founder Dov Charney and his team really want?

THE music streaming service, Spotify, now allows unlimited free listening. This is seen as a great step forward: the company’s technology is getting better, they’re getting better at selling ads and all that sort of stuff. This may or may not be the actual reason they’re lifting their previous limits though:

Spotify’s advertising engine and paid customer conversion funnel are finally working well enough that today it eliminated all limits on free, ad-supported web listening in all countries. It’s an important milestone for the scalability and sustainability of Spotify’s business that contrasts with other streaming music services like Ex.fm and Rdio that are stumbling or shutting down.

DIDDO has “aroused the curiosity of creators and tastemakers, receiving requests from the likes of Sasha Baron Cohen, Kanye West and Lady Gaga.” That’s what it says on his website.He ads that he “was born on the luckiest day since the sixth century (7-7-’77).”

Diddo studied at The University of Portsmouth.

And he’s made a skull from cocaine. No, it’s not Pete Doherty’s X-Ray.

THIS is a bit of a surprise really, given RyanAir’s long standing policy on being listed upon any of the flight comparison sites like Skyscanner. That they’re going to team up with Google in order to build a site that will be incorporated into the Google home pages and search index:

There are some very exciting developments with Google, where we have been working with them on sharing the pricing.

We’ll be sharing the Ryanair pricing through all of the Google outlets, so when you go in, there’ll be route selections, cheapest prices and so on. Google are developing a price-comparison thing themselves.

They want to launch with us and we’re working with them on that kind of product. It’ll blow comparison sites like Skyscanner out of the water.

WITH so many “important things” going on the world, why spend time looking at forty year old sweaters? Simply put, the brain needs a break from the barrage of jarring images of a world on the brink. A tour of 70s men’s sweaters is exactly what the doctor ordered.

“WHERE is the Close Up effect? I’ve been waiting for it for over seven years,” says Anthony Olatunfe. He’s using Unilever Nigeria Limited for failing to live up to the promise that brushing with Close Up toothpaste makes you irresistible to women.

AT the foot of the Shimao Skyscrapers in China’s Wuxi City, a fake shopping district has popped up featuring storefronts marked with signs that knock-off major international brands like Starbucks (now “SFFCCCKS”), H&M (now “H&N”), and Apple (now “Appla”).

Hug China reports that there are no actual stores behind the signs, that local real estate professionals have created these phony, but familiar, brands to make the property more appealing to potential buyers.

In New Zealand, there is a big problem with an ever-growing population of small, cat-sized critters, the non-native possum. Now considered the island country’s public enemy #1, the beady-eyed brushtail possum was introduced in 1837 to New Zealand from Australia as a way to establish a fur trade. Prior to this, New Zealand had evolved without such mammals for many millions of years. Not only are these marsupials dangerous predators to the South Pacific nation’s defensiveless indigenous species, they have also dramatically impacted its delicate ecosystem by multiplying into the millions and eating literally tons of the country’s vegetation each night. On top of all that, they are often carriers of the contagious disease, bovine tuberculosis.

THERE have been thousands of boxed games (board games and their ilk) published over the years. For your convenience, we’ve pulled together twenty of the most peculiar (in no particular order). Don’t say you weren’t warned.

1. GAY MONOPOLY (1983)

Alas, “The Parker Sisters” company was sued by Parker Brothers, and is subsequently with us no more. Thankfully, copies of their games still remain, including this gay themed Monopoly game featuring such real estate options as Castro Street and bath houses. In the place of the familiar boot and iron is a stiletto heel and blow-dryer. Naturally, there are $3.00 bills.

FAT is bad. The top-down message is consistent. The Mail leads with news that Obesity is “worse than we first feared”.

Whose afraid of a fat planet? As the BBC reported this year: “Obesity quadruples to nearly one billion in developing world.” In the report “Implications for agriculture and food prices”, Sharada Keats and Steve Wiggins, note:

Over one third of all adults across the world – 1.46 billion people – are obese or overweight.

Miss Helen Keller, probably the most famous blind woman in the world, photographed in New York City on Oct. 29, 1931 with a bust of herself sculptured by count Hans-Albrecht Hafrach of Munich, Germany. The bust was presented to the American Foundation for the Blind by M.C. Migel, president of the American Foundation for the Blind, to pay a tribute to the work of Miss Keller for the organization.

IN 1933, German students planned to burn “Un-German” books. Helen Keller wrote this open letter to the students:

TO the Farndon Fields Farm Shop, in Market Harborough, Leicestershire, where staff have found a potato of interest. Marketing manager Nicola Stokes tells us: “Kevin the managing director brought it into the office and everyone fell around laughing. He’d been sorting the potatoes which had been harvested and found this. It was hilarious.”

Kevin Stokes is a “potato ambassador”, sitting on the Potato Council in the east of England.Nichola adds: “We’ve put it in a dark drawer. Mainly because we don’t really know what to do with it. But we might use it to promote a Breast Cancer campaign or something. It would be nice to do something productive with it.”

CHERYL Cole has ago but role of “nation’s sweetheart”. But now thank to Max Clifford Solution, you can hark back to those halcyon days of Princess Diana and Jade Goody in “Together Forever” – features “two Princesses from opposite side of the track, joined forever in happiness in the hereafter.

“From the authentic matchplay-grade table tennis table, to the bats backed with genuine dimpled rubber, to the intricately sculpted angel wings, every details of this collectors’ heirloom figurine is designed to give you joy”

Believed to date from 1875 and one of only three buildings of Townscape Merit in Schoolhouse Lane, this building, along with no 23, was probably built as a Pub since it has an imposing pedimented top and pediments over the windows. At the front it has an extension at ground floor level to the pavement and two entrances, one of them with a double door.